Seeing the Body, by Rachel Eliza Griffiths (Norton). A daughter mourns her mother’s death in this collection of poems, excavating her personal loss amid the wider traumas of racism and misogyny. “Behind my eyes / a dead woman looks back at me with no trace / of recognition,” she writes. Griffiths, who is also a visual artist, includes a series of anguished photographic self-portraits, and she is fascinated with the power of images to document and distort. In her elegiac, enraged poems, the injustices suffered by women and black people find an echo in the cosmic injustice of mortality. Ultimately, the work draws lyrical intensity from its resistance to oblivion and its insistence, despite despair, on life.
Published in the print edition of the July 6 & 13, 2020, issue.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/07/06/humankind-scandinavian-noir-blue-ticket-and-seeing-the-body